The Shadow of the Cathedral Part 23

In spite of the enthusiasm with which Gabriel spoke, his hearers did not appear to share these illusions. They were silent, and their att.i.tude was one of coldness before the immense distance of that future to which their master confided all his hopes of universal prosperity. They wished for it at once, with the eagerness of a child who is shown a dainty which is afterwards put out of its reach. The sacrifices, the slow work for the future, struck no chord in their minds. From Gabriel's explanations they only drew the fact that they were unhappy, but that they had the same right to happiness and comfort as those privileged few whom they had formerly respected in their ignorance. As a certain portion of human felicity belonged to them they wished to possess it at once, without delay or resistance, with all the fervour of one claiming what belongs to him. Luna remarked in this silence a certain rebellion, like those ironical gestures with which his companions in Barcelona had received his illusions about the future and his anathemas against violence of action.

These ardent neophytes outdistanced their teacher; they listened to him with respect, but they were obliged to isolate themselves from him in order to digest his teachings in their own fashion. Don Martin was the only one who followed him in his visionary excursions into the future. The bell-ringer, the organ-blower, the shoemaker and the Tato now went up nightly to the bell-ringer's house, without summoning the master, and there they gave vent to their hatred of everything existing, under the forgotten old prints, yellow and wrinkled, which pictured the inglorious episodes of the Carlist war.

This nocturnal reunion was a continual complaint against social injustice. They thought themselves even more unfortunate when they took an exact review of their situation. The shoemaker recalled with tearful eyes the little child who had died of hunger, and spoke of the misery of his offspring, so numerous as to render his work useless.

The organ-blower spoke of his miserable old age, the six reals daily during his life, without any hope of earning more. The Tato, in the fits of rage of a bullying c.o.xcomb, proposed to behead all the canons in the choir some evening and then to set fire to the Cathedral. And the bell-ringer, gloomy and scowling, said aloud, following up the course of his thoughts:

"And below so much wealth that is of no use to anybody--ama.s.sed from pure pride--thieves! robbers!"

Gabriel returned to pa.s.s his days by Sagrario's side. His disciples hid themselves daily more carefully in their isolation in the tower.

Don Martin had his mother ill, and could not leave the convent.

Silver Stick felt quite satisfied with Luna seeing him alone, believing that it was he who had alienated his disciples, cutting short in this way his dangerous conversations so as to restore order in the cloister. One day he addressed him smilingly with a patronising manner.

"You will be rewarded for your good conduct, Gabrielillo, much sooner than you expect. Did I not say I would look out for something for you in exchange for the help you gave me in showing the treasury? Well, now you have it. From next week two pesetas daily will fall into your purse like two suns. Are you equal to staying all night in the Cathedral? The older watchman, the one who was a civil guard, is tired of it, and is going home to his own village. It appears that since his dog died he has taken a dislike to the duties. The other watchman is very poorly and wants a companion. Will you undertake it? If it were winter I should not say anything about it, as you cough too much to spend the night down there; but in summer the Cathedral is the coolest place in Toledo. What lovely nights! And by the time bad weather comes on we will have found you some better place. You are trustworthy, though your head is rather light; but you come of an honoured and well-known family, which is what is wanted. Do you accept?"

Luna accepted, declaring his intention to Esteban, when the latter objected on account of his weak health. He would only undertake the watchman's duties during the summer; besides, two pesetas a day were even more than Wooden Staff earned; the income of the family would be doubled, and it would be a pity to lose such a good opportunity.

That evening Sagrario spoke to her uncle praising the energy which prompted him to undertake any sort of work so as not to be a charge on the family.

They were in the cloister leaning on the bal.u.s.trade; below was the dark garden with its waving branches, above a summer sky veiled by the heat haze which dulled the brightness of the stars. They were alone in the four-sided gallery. The lighted windows of the Chapel-master's little room threw a square of red on the opposite roofs. They could hear the harmonium playing slowly and sadly, and when it stopped the shadow of the musician pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed over the square of light with his nervous gestures, which, enlarged by the reflection, appeared the most grotesque contortions.

The nocturnal calm and darkness surrounded Gabriel and Sagrario with a gentle caress; that mysterious freshness was falling from above which seems to revive drooping spirits and magnify old remembrances. The Church seemed to them as an immense sleeping beast, in whose lap they had found peace and protection.

Gabriel spoke of his past, in order to convince the young woman that his work in the Cathedral would not be very arduous. He had suffered much; there was no bitterness that he had not tasted; he had endured hunger, terrible hunger, in his peregrinations through the world.

He did not know which were the most painful, his martyrdom in the dungeons of the gloomy castle, or his days of despair in the streets of crowded cities, seeing food and gold through the gla.s.s windows of the shops while his head was swimming with the dizziness of hunger.

He could endure his misery while he wandered alone through the cruel selfishness of civilisation; but the most horrible days were those in which he shared his vagabond poverty with Lucy, his gentle and melancholy companion.

Gabriel spoke of the Englishwoman as of a dead sister.

"Had you known her, Sagrario, you would have loved her. She was a strong woman, a brave companion, united to me more by the community of thought than by carnal attraction. I loved her when I first saw her.

I hardly know if it was love that we felt; poets have written so many lies about love, and have falsified it in such an exaggerated way, that I do not for certain know what it is."

He spoke to the young woman of love, explaining it according to his beliefs. Goethe had defined it as an "elective affinity," speaking as a man of science and not as a poet, using the term that chemistry gives to the tendency of two substances to unite and form a distinct product. Two beings between whom no affinity existed could meet through false laws of life in perpetual contact, but they could not mix or merge into one another. This happened more often than not between the individuals of different s.e.xes who peopled the earth; a pa.s.sing sentimentality could exist, or carnal caprice, but seldom love. The poor invalid Lucy was his affinity; they met and they loved.

In their pity for human miseries, their hatred of inequalities and injustice, their self-abnegation in the cause of the humble and unfortunate they were equal; they were not only united by their hearts but by their brains.

She was plain, with a soft and sad plainness that seemed to Luna the supreme ideal of beauty in the midst of that struggling world of unfortunates and victims. She was the image of a woman of the people reared in the workmen's slums of great cities, anaemic from the mephitic air of the den in which she was born and from bad and insufficient food, with a wretched body, all feminine graces paralysed in their development by the rough work done in her childhood. Her lips, that great ladies paint red, were violet; the only beauty of her face lay in her eyes, those windows of sorrow, made larger by the cold nights pa.s.sed in the street from horror of the scenes she saw in her childhood; her father, drunken, with the brutal wish of a workman to forget, who, after imagining that his tavern was a paradise, would become infuriated with the poverty of his home and beat the whole family.

"She was like all you women of the lower orders, Sagrario. Your beauty only lasts an instant; in fact, it can only exist in the first flush of youth. A woman of the poor cannot be beautiful unless she gets out of her cla.s.s. Daily labour makes her lose all her freshness and strength, and maternity in the midst of poverty absorbs even the marrow in her bones. When her daily work is ended and she returns home, she has to sweep and wash, and shrivel herself to a mummy before the smoky kitchen stove. I loved Lucy for that reason, because she was consumed and drained by sweating, because she was the girl worker in all her melancholy decadence, born beautiful and made hideous by social injustice."

He recalled the unbending and deadly hatred with which that little woman spoke so quietly of the supreme vengeance of the fallen, of the revenge for long years of oppression. She showed herself more firmly rooted and fiercer in her illusions than Gabriel, and he would praise her daring as a propagandist, her perilous expeditions into the great towns, running the gauntlet of watchful police, carrying on her arm that old bonnet-box full of pamphlets that might have sent her to prison. She was the "miss" animated by evangelical propaganda, who travels over the globe distributing Bibles with a cold smile, fearless alike of the mockery of civilisation, or the brutality of savages; but what Lucy distributed were incitements to revolution; she did not seek out the happy but the despairing, in the factories and infected slums. The two endured hunger, finding themselves often separated by persecution and prison, but they met again, continuing their romantic career, till poverty and consumption ended her life.

Gabriel wept, remembering their last interview in an Italian hospital, clean and sweet, but with the frozen atmosphere of charity. As he was not her husband he could only visit her twice a week. He presented, himself ragged and downcast, seeing her in an armchair daily paler and weaker, her skin of a waxen transparency and her eyes immensely enlarged. He knew a little about everything, and he could not conceal from himself the gravity of her illness. She waited quietly for death.

"Bring me some roses," she said, smiling to Gabriel, as if in the last moment of her life she wished to acknowledge the natural beauty of the world made hideous and darkened by man. The "companion" lived on dry bread, refusing the help of his comrades only a little less poor than himself, sleeping on the ground, in order to take her on his next visit a bunch of flowers.

"She died, Sagrario," groaned Luna, "and I know not where they buried her; possibly she may have served for a lecture at the school of anatomy; she fell into the common grave like those soldiers whose heroism remains in obscurity. But I still see her; she has followed me in all my misfortunes, and I think she lives again in you."

"But uncle," said Sagrario, gently, touched by his recital, "I cannot do what she did. I am an unhappy woman, without strength or will."

"Call me Gabriel," said Luna, vehemently. "You are my Lucy, who again crosses my path; I knew it from the first, and for a long while I have been searching my feelings, a.n.a.lysing my will, and I have arrived at one certainty--that I love you, Sagrario."

The young woman made a gesture of surprise, drawing further from him.

"Do not draw away, do not fear me. I am a feeble man, you are a weak woman; you have suffered much, and have bid good-bye to the joys of the earth, but you are strong through misfortune and can look the truth in the face. We are both wrecks of life, and the only hope left us is to wait and die quietly in the desert island which is our refuge. We are undone, rent and swept away; Death has laid his hand upon us; we are fallen and shapeless rags after having pa.s.sed through the mills of an absurd society. For this reason I love you, because you are my equal in misfortune; elective affinity unites us. Poor Lucy was the work-girl enfeebled by sweating, weakened from her birth by poverty. You were the girl of the people drawn from her home by the attraction of the well-being of the privileged; seduced, not by love, but by the caprices of the happy; the girl offered as a sacrifice to the Minotaur whose remains were afterwards thrown on to the dunghill.

I love you, Sagrario; we are two fugitives from society, whose paths must join; I am hated as dangerous, you are despised as an outcast; misfortune has laid hold on us. Our bodies are weakened and we bear the wounds of the conquered, but before death claims us, let us make our lives sweet by love. Let us seek for roses as did poor Lucy."

He pressed the young woman's hands, who, bewildered by Gabriel's words, knew not what to say, and wept softly. Upstairs, in the upper storey of the Claverias, the Chapel-master played his harmonium.

Gabriel knew the music: it was Beethoven's last lament, the "Must it be," that the great genius sang before his death with a melancholy that made one shiver.

"I love you, Sagrario," continued Gabriel, "ever since I saw you return to this house, bravely facing the odious curiosity of the people around. I have spent weeks and months by the side of your machine, seeing how industriously you worked. I have studied you and read you. You are a sincere and simple creature; your mind has none of the doublings and hidden corners of those complicated and tortuous souls used to the artifices of civilisation. I guessed day by day, by your gentle glance and the attention with which you listened to me, your grat.i.tude for the little I was able to do for you. I remembered the dark period of your life, your slavery to the flesh; and finding me always gentle with you, protecting you from your father's anger, your grat.i.tude has grown and grown, till to-day you love me, Sagrario.

You yourself have not realised it, you know not how to explain it, but your being responds to mine like those chemical substances I spoke of.

That single and eternal love is a lying invention of the poets, of which facts often make a mockery. One can love several people with equal warmth: the indispensable thing is the affinity. You who formerly loved a man to madness, what do you feel for me? Have I deceived myself? You really love me?"

Sagrario continued weeping, with her head bent, as though she did not dare to look at Luna. He rea.s.sured her gently: she must call him Gabriel, speak to him as "thou." Were they not companions in misfortune?

"I am ashamed," murmured the young woman. "So much happiness disturbs me. Yes, I like you. No, I love you, Gabriel. I would never have confessed it; I would have died sooner than reveal my secret. What am I that anyone should love me? For many days I have not looked in the gla.s.s, for I should weep at the remembrance of my lost youth. And then my story--my terrible story. How could I imagine that you--or, I should say, that thou, wouldst read my thoughts so clearly? See how I tremble; the shock has not yet ceased, the surprise of finding my secret discovered. A man like you to descend to me, ugly and sick for ever. No, do not speak of the other man; I forgot him long ago. And am I going to remember him now that you give me the charity of your love?

No, Gabriel, you are the greatest and best of men; you are like a G.o.d to me."

They remained silent a long while with their hands clasped, looking into the darkness of the murmuring garden. From above still sounded the lament of the genius at his fading life.

Sagrario leant on Gabriel as though her strength were failing, and as if terrified at so much happiness, she wished to take refuge in his arms.

"Why have I known you so late!" she said in a low voice. "I should have wished to love you in my youth, to be beautiful and healthy only for you, to have the beauty and charm of a great lady to soften the rest of your life. But my grat.i.tude can offer you little, nothing but ill-health; the seeds of death are in me, and slowly I shall fade away. Gabriel, why did you set your heart on me?"

"Because you are an invalid, and unfortunate as I am. Our misery is the loving affinity. Besides, I have never loved like most men. In my travels I have seen the most beautiful women in the world without the slightest glow of desire. I am not of an amorous temperament. From my adventures in Paris when I was young I always returned with a feeling of disgust. My love for the unfortunate has mastered me to the point of blunting my feelings. I am like a drunkard or a gambler, who, obsessed by their pa.s.sion, feel nothing before a woman. A studious man, buried in his books, feels very little the calls of s.e.x. My pa.s.sion is pity for the disinherited, and hatred of injustice and inequality. It has so entirely absorbed me, enslaving all my faculties, that I have never had time to think of love. The female does not attract me, but I worship a woman when I see her sad and unfortunate. Ugliness makes more impression on me than beauty, because it speaks to me of social infamies, it shows me the bitterness of injustice, it is the only wine which revives my strength. I loved Lucy because she was unfortunate and dying. I love you, Sagrario, because in your early youth you were a wanderer in life, one whom no one would love. My love is for you, to brighten what remains to you of life."

Sagrario leant on Gabriel's breast.

"How good you are!" she sighed; "what a beautiful soul!"

"Yours is the same, poor Sagrario. Your life has been a snare. You sold yourself through hunger and despair as do thousands of others; you thought to find bread in the false pretences of love. Everything is for the privileged of this world: the arms of the father, the s.e.x of the daughter, and when those arms are weakened, or the youthful body loses its charms, they are thrown on one side and replaced. The market is abundant; I love you for your misfortunes. Had I seen you young and beautiful as in former times, I should not have felt the slightest attraction. Beauty is a bar to sentiment. The Sagrario of former times, with her dreams of being a great lady flattered by the words of youthful lovers, brightly dressed like brilliant birds, would never have thought of a vagabond aged by misery, ugly and sick. We understand each other because we are unfortunate; misery allows us to see into each other's souls; in full happiness we should never have met."

"It is true," she murmured, leaning her head on Gabriel's shoulder. "I love that misery which has allowed us to know, each other."

"You will be my companion," continued Luna, in a soft tone. "We will pa.s.s our lives together till death breaks the chain. I will protect you, although the protection of a sick and persecuted man is not worth much."

He pa.s.sed his arm round the woman, raising her head with his other hand, fixing his eyes on those of Sagrario, which were shining in the starlight bright with tears.

"We shall be two souls, two minds who cherish one another without giving rein to pa.s.sion, and with a purity such as no poets have imagined. This night in which we have mutually confessed one to another, in which our souls have been laid open to one another is our wedding night; kiss me, companion of my life!"

And in the silence of the cloister they kissed each other noiselessly, slowly, as though with their lips joined they were weeping over the misery of their past, and the brevity of a love around which death was circling. Above, the lament of Beethoven went on unfolding its sad modulations, which floated through the cloister and round the sleeping Cathedral.

Gabriel stood erect sustaining Sagrario, who seemed almost fainting from the strength of her feelings; he looked up at the luminous s.p.a.ce with almost priestly gravity, and said, whispering close to the young woman's ear:

"Our life will be like a deserted garden, where amid fallen trunks and dead branches fresh foliage springs up. Companion, let us love one another. Above our misery as pariahs let spring arise. It will be a sad spring, without fruit, but it will have flowers. The sun shines for those who are in the open, but for us, dear companion, it is very far. But from the black depths of our well we will clasp each other, raising our heads, and though his heat will not revive us, we will adore him like a distant star."

CHAPTER X